Income Tax Dept launches ITR-5 Excel utility for AY 2024-25 filing

The Income Tax Department has released the ITR-5 Excel utility for AY 2024-25, enabling partnership firms, LLPs, and other eligible entities to file returns. Updates include MSME, startup, and crypto reporting provisions, with a September 15 deadline for non-audit cases

New Delhi: The Income Tax Department on Saturday released the ITR-5 Excel Utility for Assessment Year 2024–25. This utility can be used by partnership firms, Limited Liability Partnerships (LLPs), and cooperative societies to file their annual returns.

Associations of Persons, Bodies of Individuals, artificial juridical persons, cooperative societies, societies registered under the Societies Registration Act, local authorities, and certain business trusts and investment funds are other eligible entities.

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Entities other than individuals, Hindu Undivided Families (HUFs), companies, and those required to use ITR-7 can use the ITR-5 form. The IT department on the social media platform X said, “Kind Attention Taxpayers! Excel Utility of ITR-5 is live now and is available for filing.”

The ITR-5 structure includes detailed financial disclosures, including general information, balance sheet, manufacturing and trading accounts, profit and loss statement etc. Income schedules from various sources, loss set-off, depreciation, deductions, exempt income, foreign assets, GST reconciliation, and tax relief are part of the ITR-5 filing structure.

Key updates for AY 2024–25 include new sections for MSME registration and Section 80-IAC startup deductions, along with expanded reporting for emerging income categories like virtual digital assets (crypto/NFTs).

The updated ITR-5 now permits reporting of buyback losses only if the related dividend has been taxed.

The deadline for filing returns for non-audit cases is September 15. Taxpayers can do e-verification or physically verify their returns by sending the signed form to the Centralised Processing Centre (CPC) in Bengaluru within 30 days.

Supporting documents are not needed, but tax credits must match Form 26AS. Before filing, taxpayers must ensure portal registration, bank account validation for refunds, updated digital signatures, and submission of applicable statutory forms.

The income tax department has released Excel utilities for ITR-2 and ITR-3 for AY 2025-26. ITR-1 and ITR-4 were released earlier. In the recent budget, long-term capital gains (LTCG) tax on all financial and non-financial assets has been revised to 12.5 per cent (up from 10 per cent for equities). Short-term capital gains (STCG) tax on some assets, like equities, is now 20 per cent (up from 15 per cent).

All listed financial assets held for more than a year would be classified now as long-term assets.